Being rejected is a part of the process. This year I threw my name in more hats and bigger hats than years past. Naturally, more rejection emails than usual came this spring. Before saying anything further, and while maintaining the anonymity of these various institutions, I will quote from a number of them:

I regret to inform you that you were not among the applicants selected. Admission to this year’s program was very competitive due to the unprecedented number of highly qualified applicants.

This year we received an unprecedented number of applications from around the world. Because of your diligent preparation of scores, recordings and proposals, our judging panel had an enormously difficult task. After careful consideration, we are sorry to inform you that you have not been chosen as our winner.

I’m writing to let you know that you are not one of the ten composers selected by the panel to attend the Intensive. We were overwhelmed with both the quality and the volume of applications that came in from all across the nation, …

The number of incredible applications we received exceeded our expectations, and the competition for the small number of openings was fierce. Unfortunately, we are unable to offer you a spot at the 2015 festival.

We received an unprecedented number of submissions this year and unfortunately yours was not among those selected …

We have a final count of 1017 pieces of music from 408 composers. WOW! … Unfortunately your music did not make it into our opening season.

This year’s program generated an unprecedented level of response: we received 479 submissions from composers in 39 states! … Let me emphasize that although you were not chosen this time around, …

Is 2015 a boom year for young composers’ applications to awards, calls for scores, summer programs, commissioning projects, and the like? Unprecedented means “never known before” according to my Apple computer dictionary. Is it possible that composers from 10 states submitted pieces in 2014, and suddenly we’re up to 39 states in 2015? Across this many institutions?Are these lies—what else are they—supposed to make me feel better? That I find absurd, especially since the insincerity bleeds through so obviously when the examples are gathered. Somehow, I can’t imagine this overuse of the word “unprecedented” for the same sort of letter a few decades back. Are our characters so weak in this day and age and our near fetish for feeling hurt and offended so prevalent and extreme that we need phrases like these? Are we so hostile to those with the authority to include some and exclude others that we in some sense require their enterprise to be tinged with randomness and impossibility, no matter the actual legitimacy of these institutions and their processes?I don’t believe in competitions in the arts in the sense of their really meaning anything. But too many times is it in the voice of the institution itself that is judging its applicants that the inevitably not completely meritocratic nature of a competition in the arts is revealed. In what way is that not outright disrespectful, to exclude someone and in the same breath imply that their exclusion was at least in part based on arbitrary choices… so they shouldn’t take it personally? Of course I shouldn’t take it personally, and I don’t, but that is not why!By saying that there were an unprecedented number of applicants, particularly when there were not a truly “unprecedented” (as opposed to “large”) number of applicants, I am in a way being told that my piece, portfolio, or application might have been as good as the ones that were chosen, but oh, it was still not chosen. Nothing can truly be better than anything else. We have gone mad in our relativisms and equations of all things. Almost as mad as the MPAA warning I saw a while back that said, “Selma is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Violence, bigotry, brief cigarette smoking.”(Apr 6, 2015)